E-mails between the players behind a health-care reform ad attacking Congressman Ed Perlmutter show they wanted the commercial to continue to run — despite concerns it contained errors — until their new spot was ready to air.

“When we do we have the new ad?” Bruce Haynes at Purple Strategies asked on Wednesday. ” … I want to make sure this stays on till the new one ships.”

“If this ad gets ‘em this worked up, imagine what they’re gonna do when the next one goes live,” wrote Kevin Wright, founder and director of Old Dominion Research Group.

The e-mails were also sent to Pete Meachum and Rob Collins with American Action Network, the outside group paying for more $1 million worth of attack ads against Perlmutter, a Golden Democrat running against Republican Ryan Frazier.

The new ad is as inaccurate as the first, said Perlmutter’s spokeswoman, Leslie Oliver.

It features a woman saying, “Apparently convicted rapists can get Viagra paid for by the new health-care bill.”

Voters are then asked to call Perlmutter.

“The bill also doesn’t stop Martians masquerading as humans from getting a proctological exam,” Oliver said. “The claims in this ad are just absurd and Ryan Frazier should condemn this ad and call on the American Action Network to disclose their donors.”

The group has been profiled in recent stories about outside organizations raking in millions in secret donations to air attack ads, mostly against Democrats.

“This is an over the top, last minute, Hail Mary pass by a shady group of Wall Street guys who are mad at Ed for voting to reign in their risky gambling,” Oliver said.

The first ad from American Action Network says Perlmutter “cut $500 billion in Medicare for seniors and then spent our money on health insurance for illegal immigrants.”

Tom Tancredo unleashed a radio spot today targeting Dan Maes and brutal might not be a strong enough word to describe it.

Tancredo calls him a liar and implies he’s swindled his campaign out of thousands of dollars. In some ways, it makes those Ken Buck/Michael Bennet attack ads we’ve all seen ad nauseam look soft and fluffy.

Nate Strauch, spokesman for Maes, said: “The focus in this race should be on the liberal policies of John Hickenlooper. This ad is another in a long line of head-scratchers.”

A new radio ad from the Colorado Conservation Victory Fund slams third-party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo for backing the controversial Referendum A, which would’ve provided $2 billion in revenue bonds for major water projects.

The measure, which pitted Front Range development interests and much of Colorado’s agriculture industry against those determined to keep water in mountain streams and rivers, was defeated by voters in 2003. Let’s just say that it’s not exactly going to help Tancredo to have Western Slope voters reminded of his support for the referendum.

“It’s time to forget DeGette, who seems to have forgotten who she works for,” Fallon says.

The catchy ad features folks wearing name tags that say “Broke” and “Unemployed.”

It’s been a while since DeGette faced a serious challenge because the Denver-based 1st Congressional District leans heavily Democrat. Republicans consider Fallon, an emergency-room doctor who thinks health-care reform is unworkable, their best shot at winning the seat in years.

“The time is now. The time is absolutely now,” says Tom Tancredo’s campaign manager in a voicemail message to an ardent supporter of GOP gubernatorial nominee Dan Maes.

Maes backer Joe Harrington posted a recording of the voice message to his Facebook page this afternoon, claiming that it’s proof the Tancredo campaign wants to cut a deal to get Maes out of the race.

“(Maes has) got to find somebody that he trusts to talk to us, somebody who he trusts their word,” Tancredo campaign manager Bay Buchanan says after noting the Republican’s slipping poll numbers in the message. “And that, I’d be glad to talk to you about that… Give me a call if you’re interested. I won’t bother you any more if you aren’t.”

Democratic Senate candidate Michael Bennet’s campaign today leaped on GOP opponent Ken Buck’s comments praising an Oklahoma senator who called global warming “a hoax,” saying it is further proof that Buck is out of step with moderate Coloradans.

During a gathering of supporters in Larimer County Wednesday, Buck said, “Sen. (James) Inhofe was the first person to stand up and say this global warming is the greatest hoax that has been perpetrated,” Buck said, according to the Fort Collins Coloradoan. “The evidence just keeps supporting his view, and more and more people’s view, of what’s going on.”

Buck made the comments before heading to a Loveland fundraiser with Inhofe last night.

Bennet’s camp said the statement was another example of Buck’s “too extreme” for Colorado stances and “could prove cataclysmic for our national security,” said Bennet spokesman Trevor Kincaid. “This radical position is also clearly dangerous — costing jobs, risking our security and destroying our environment.”

Kincaid notes that the mountainous state can expect more than $1 billion in annual losses because of “a predicted drier, warmer climate,” according to studies.

But after multiple stories on the comments were picked up nationally, Buck’s campaign mid-day Wednesday said Buck does believe in man-made climate change.

At first, Buck’s spokesman, Owen Loftus, shot back that, “environmental challenges” can be solved “by building a strong coalition of stakeholders, including state and local interests, not draconian measures imposed by Washington that will have virtually no impact. Sadly, Bennet’s so-called solution to global warming would be all cost for no climate gain.”

Then later, Loftus issued a new statement saying Buck does believe in global warming.

“Ken believes there is global warming, but thinks the evidence points to it being natural, rather than manmade,” he said.

That position is consistent with what Buck said on the primary campaign trail.

‘I’ll tell you, I have looked at global warming, now climate change, from both sides,”” Buck said in August to “Talking Points Memo.” “While I think the earth is warming, I don’t think that man-made causes are the primary factor. I am one of those people that Al Gore refers to as a skeptic.”

You know you’re a political junkie when … you read an interview with Monica Owens and say to yourself, “That’s not right because she wasn’t even born yet.”

Owens, the daughter of former Gov. Bill Owens, was featured today in The Denver Post’s must-read weekly feature Bar&Grilled.

She was quoted as saying, “Since I was 3, he was in elected office.”

I shot an e-mail to Owens and Owens, questioning that detail: “Your mom was pregnant with you when your dad first ran for the House, as I recall. He was sworn in January and you were born in March. This is all from memory and, granted, it ain’t what it used to be.”

The ex gov wrote back: “Great catch — was sworn in January 1983.”

Me and one of daddy's signs.

The younger (and prettier) Owens wrote that she said in her 27 years her dad has only been out of office three years, but it came out wrong.

2) When Owens left office in 2006 because of term limits, I did a Q&A with the three Owens children. The governor initially turned down my request so I bypassed him, and worked with Monica and spokesman Dan Hopkins, and we finally got “the big man,” as his kids jokingly called him, to relent.

Updated 12:39 p.m. to reflect comments on political ads belong to Tim Egan, not me.

(THIRD) PARTY ON: Less than two weeks from election day, it’s possible to imagine a Tom Tancredo governorship, The Los Angeles Times notes. A poll late last week found him just 4 percentage points behind Democrat John Hickenlooper, whose support has stayed flat while Republican nominee Dan Maes is flirting with single digits. It is only one poll, and from a Republican-leaning pollster, but it matched the arc that all polls have picked up since Tancredo entered the race in late August — his support is rising as Hickenlooper’s is stalling.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: Democrats surveying Colorado’s gubernatorial contest between Democrat John Hickenlooper, Republican Dan Maes, and third-party candidate Tom Tancredo are probably wishing such a Republican implosion could have happened in more races across the country, Marc Ambinder writes in The Atlantic.

GOING NEGATIVE ON NEGATIVE ADS:I wish Timothy Egan writes in a New York Times opinion piece that he wishes “Chief Justice John Roberts could spend a day and a night in the Rocky Mountains experiencing what his activist Supreme Court majority has dumped on the American voter in 2010. The sludge flow from out-of-state, secretive political groups is unrelenting. All hours. All mediums. If the hell of Colorado’s current election season is what those isolated, black-robed kingmakers on the high court had in mind, you certainly didn’t see it in the nonsense of their decision.”

PARTY OF NO COMPROMISE: Ken Buck tells The Washington Post that he would be willing to work with Democrats on some issues of importance to Colorado but not on the issues that have defined the midterm elections. “I think it’s wrong to compromise your values to fit in with the social climate in Washington, D.C. When it comes to spending, I’m not compromising. I don’t care who, what, when or where, I’m not compromising.”

QUOTABLE:

“So many of these quote-unquote gaffes are made-up nonsense to distract voters from the economic issues that are so important,” Ken Buck to the Washington Post.

NEW JOB IN NEW ENERGY? Gov. Bill Ritter tells The Pueblo Chieftain he wants to remain active in the renewable energy and climate change arenas after he moves out of the governor’s mansion. “I hope at some level, after I’m no longer the governor of Colorado, to be able to work on that.”

DOBSON GOES OFF: In a newsletter for his new ministry, Family Talk, James Dobson lashed out against President Barack Obama, Muslims, the federal health care package, abortion activism, gays in the military and his view that America is becoming a socialist country, The Gazette reports. Dobson writes of “death panels,” the “global warming myth,” and quotes Winston Churchill on Islam, which the British statesman called “a militant and proselytizing faith” of which “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.